


The Spoils

by Fells



Category: The Huntsman (Movies)
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Post-Canon, Shapeshifting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 08:57:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8884813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fells/pseuds/Fells
Summary: Queen takes all.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fresne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fresne/gifts).



_B_ ehold the mirror: winking like a sunstruck eye, it hangs entombed in the great hall of the icy northland palace and bears witness to chaos. _Behold,_ urge the sigils binding its edge, _and speak the words_. Strange visions pass over its surface in silence. A wheel of stars, spinning faster than darkness can follow. Hands, old and young, joined over low embers. Stray dogs roaming the sumptuous halls of a palace. Truths bound by magic, skinned from the flank of an unknowable elsewhere. Often, the images seem impossible. Always, it is only because their time has yet to come.

The beginning is there, and the end, but Freya has no strength to rise and see what it would reveal under her bloodied fingers. Wounded and weary, she tells herself that ignorance is better now; it is better not to look, not to know what comes for her. Throughout the silver hall, her grim, nimble huntsmen are withering as Ravenna crows over them. Her limbs are whetted and many, whirling around her in a mantis dance. Clever limbs, knitting shadows that crawl forth to honor her with mayhem. Above them all the mirror observes, committing it all to some hidden lens that serves as its memory. From afar it simply appears to gleam, precious. A disc of pure gold, of mosaic pearl, of sweet honey. Cursing the water in her heart, Freya reaches toward it at last. Deadly frost climbs its edge — but she cannot reach to the core. Magic rushes from it in an invincible torrent while Ravenna's faceless conjurings rise and rise.

It fuels her, Freya realizes through a haze of pain and fury, without limit. It shows her all and she sees the one future she desires, narrowing that vast power to a pinprick. And for what? Kingdoms. The mirror holds _worlds_. In the winter dark only days ago, Freya had stood alone in its presence for the first time. She had looked upon it and seen its depth. It is not a window, she had suddenly understood, but a well. And the reflection it had offered her then was like a secret whispered between them.

What a price Ravenna paid. And after all that, Freya thinks, what a waste of an oracle.

With blood pooling on the dais steps beneath her, she holds the mirror on the verge of shattering, undecided, losing the will to make any choice at all. Waiting, perhaps, for one of her last, loyal huntsmen to act and free her from the burden of choosing. Forgetting that they are no longer hers, forgetting that such weakness should be intolerable. When Eric's axe suddenly cleaves a path through her hesitation, it is not an act of allegiance. He is no child and in truth he has never needed her. The cold blade strikes the mirror like a bolt at its very center and it splits cleanly, top to bottom. Cracks dance outward across the two great halves. Ice flows inward and the relic crumbles like clay, shards flying outward, exploding in midair, wriggling, _hatching_. Where pieces of the smoking metal strike the ground, dreadful birds sling open their wet wings and scream, trailing oil as they flee toward slivers of open sky. Ravenna screams with them and Freya smiles though her slowing heart aches. How terrible it must be to suffer such loss again.

How bitter, when all along it might have been foretold.

* * *

**"L** ook at her," the mothers crooned over her head when she was young, when she was not Ravenna and the gentle world was no larger than the distance she might walk in the span of a day. "Such a queenly girl."

And so she was, though she hardly thought it mattered. There were fields that needed working so her face and hands were often dirty, and the tenets of magic spoke to her not at all of outward grace as they opened up in her mind. _All the good must be common among us,_ she was taught but nothing was said of gifts. She thought of her skill and beauty as gifts her family gave her freely and she could not devise a way to give them back. So they were hers, to be kept with gratitude. Only privately did she wonder what she was meant to do with them.

Among the children, she was the girl who no longer seemed a child. Each and every one treated her kindly on nights when they shared a roof and mother but it did not feel to her that she knew many of them well enough to call them her blood. The mothers scolded her for that when they read it in her mind so she learned masking spells early and deliberately. Better to spare them the sting of her idle thoughts, she decided, since those thoughts would never have occasion to change. All the other children of the village were her blood, of course. She knew it from the teachings and she knew it by the logic of familiarity — but she did not feel it. In her mind, she had only one sister. Beyond that there were many cousins of a sort, boys and girls she should recognize without having to fret over every scraped knee and hexed apple as though it was a catastrophe.

She and her sister were the only two who were truly alike. All the mothers agreed it was because they were so different. Hard and soft, restless and complacent. They took homes and lessons together whenever it could be managed, and changed their names daily to confound the mothers who did not take particular interest in them. Eluding their chores, they would sneak off hand in hand over the hills that waved with soft grass to roll laughing down the tall slope that led to a cedar-dappled riverbank. For hours they leaned over the cool water and told stories for the river to carry into the yawning valley far below, a cool darkness they had long ago promised not to traverse. The river took every word dutifully and showed them the shapes of their faces, gilt with crowns of sun.

* * *

_F_ reya wakes with no memory of slumber. Her thoughts cling and stretch thin like cobwebs over rushing water, forming precarious links between here and there. She is certain there has been catastrophe, a cold reassurance. Of course. There is always catastrophe.

The vessel; her flesh. She realizes that the weight and the substance of it have fallen away somewhere, that she is balanced atop the high arch of the sky and a red path of panic is scrambling alongside her, hungry to slip beneath her and dash to the verge of some razor sharp precipice. She veers to elude it. White wings lift and buffet her incidentally but all the muscles within reach remain unresponsive to her will. An owl is her anchor, joined to her in soundless flight. It is her master and it does not heed her cares. Met with such perfect indifference, Freya is scattered briefly; the fears and furies that pin her thoughts in place loosen when she touches them, hardly more substantial than smoke.

_Easy joy. Fire. And then a storm, a blizzard that lasted forever and ever._

The owl considers these things briefly. All have a common significance: they are past.

And so they are. It is a bleak, fragile way to reconcile pleasure and pain but she feels herself converge around it. Freya watches the owl's flight, follows it through every steep and silent dive, listens to the wind stitching its breath as it rises skyward with the moon spreading in its great eyes. A map unfolds in its mind, marked with enduring shores: the rigid edge of the mountains, the forests, the unyielding earth. All the rest skitters and sways, and it is the work of a lifetime to learn the meaning of these motions. Clouds foam dark and spread thin. Trees bend and talk quietly together.

Freya lingers in the thin, still space between wingbeats, fascinated. Flight itself is familiar to her. Often, she has swept her sight southward past the limits of winter on the ships of enchanted figurines — but she has never before been the lesser will in a winged body. The vulnerability, the dainty adeptness of it thrills her. Such delicate hunters can bear no great burdens. They save space for nothing. She feels she would be diminished in such a life but wonders if that would be so terrible. Go swiftly by night, rest wary by day. A simple pattern. She practices it until she is more wind than wraith. Those hard slopes of mountain and plains become dear to her. They trap the prey the owl seeks, amplifies the currents it rides. They expose the cursed creature when it comes. Strange prey, glinting among black pines. Another bird, golden as the sun, casting false and vile shadows on the snow. The sight of it is a scourge. Freya remembers herself; not the flesh but the fury. She is a sudden bloodthirst at the back of an animal's throat and they plummet, sweeping down snowy branches in a wild descent that punctures the dark canopy below. The golden bird shrieks, struck squarely between its wings, and Freya recognizes its voice instantly.

Gold, it falls. Gold, it crashes to the dark forest floor like a handful of pins; there, it is finally extinguished. By the time Freya has righted herself and landed beside it, all traces of quill and bone have vanished. The only thing left is a small piece of metal, winking faintly amid the cold rot and soil.

The marks of a curse mottle her thoughts like fingerprints on glass. Nauseating magic comes to mind, smeared with memories. Hatred for liars and their deceits, fear for the body she has left behind, gratitude to the little beast she wields like a knife. The owl grows agitated, unable to discern any use in what it has done. So Freya leaves it, lets it grasp and carry its freedom away in a quiet flurry. She takes the mirror fragment as her last possible anchor. She does not know whether she lives, or what she is.

 _Something in between,_ Ravenna had said of herself, smiling through the turmoil of resurrection. Her body poured freshly from the mirror's bowl and she had _smiled_. A madness Freya can appreciate. Gathered near the fragment, she resolves to say the same when she has lips to form words, the breath to speak.

* * *

**A** t the beginning of a dusty autumn, a scarred, sinuous old woman brought both girls to her hearth as winter wards. It had been dry for weeks, the whole sky shorn of rainclouds long enough that the waving grass seemed to crackle like golden fire across the hills. A hard year before it had even ended, and still promising hardships. Two girls on the threshold, with two mouths and two minds grasping like water at the shore. By custom, mothers taught one at a time. Because it was easier, the old woman knew. The magic laid out no such constraints itself. Numbers were not the truths that mattered. There was flesh and blood, and then there was love, and that was a power that moved like no other thing in the world.

"There are rules. You take new names from me," the old woman told them as they crossed under eaves strung with fragrant herbs and strips of salted meat, "and those you shall keep until you need them no more."

Freya, for the girl who could find a story to tell in the way that sunlight crept across the ground. Ravenna, for the girl who dared high ledges over whistling air. The old woman smiled at them, showed them the pale knife scars climbing her hands like tiny mushrooms adorning a great, bronze tree.

"You learn your strengths. You use them, even if it means using them up someday. And," she added, her clouded eyes suddenly sparking like flints, winking back and forth between them, "you offer them freely to your brethren. Do you understand?"

"That's the cost?" Ravenna asked keenly.

"That is your privilege, my love. Someday you will meet somebody who needs it."

"We all need power," Ravenna replied and seemed ready to say more until the quiet light of Freya's gaze pricked her.

The old woman leaned close. Making certain that Ravenna would see her mortal ornaments, the creases and blemishes on her skin. Beautiful, Ravenna thought, and so different from what the mothers seemed to see when they looked into her own young face.

"Then," the old woman said, "I mean to say you will meet somebody who needs it more than you."

* * *

_T_ he white throne is all that remains of the ice queen's empire, delicate in the wilderness, weightless with no monarch upon it. The ice melts back and back, far into dire lands long hidden behind storms and shadows. Rumors of a tyrant's death blanket the mountains and tundra in a new season and crude, young power is born into the world as northlanders return to the refuge of their far-flung and forbidding settlements. Stories spread. Children dream of a soaring owl that leaves cold runes crackling on their skin. Leashed dogs howl at the black treeline, miles away. Branches in the forest bend as though bearing the weight of a creature that cannot be seen or struck with arrows and when the blizzards come rushing down the ragged cloaks of the mountains, a figure comes with them. People say she has no flesh and moves only as a chill, empty space hollowed out of the snow. A great wolf with fangs that flash like silver. A sleek bird reflecting the moon in its eyes, even beneath the thickest quilt of sleet and cloud. A woman, wandering the landscape alone. A girl who is not a girl, her skin blistered by cold and her eyes too savage for youth.

Not a god. Those never show themselves outside of fireside stories and travels that lapse into legend over time.

Freya moves through the natural snows with great care, lingering in climates known to her, still sweet in her memory. She stalks Ravenna's golden birds, luminous and hateful against the frozen steppes, and demands nothing from those who happen upon her in the wasteland. She is seen and it pleases her. The north should know that power remains crouched and growling behind the hooked peaks that clutch the top of the world. Cursed ravens fall beneath her teeth and wings and claws. They bleed bits of the mirror, and the mirror speaks. It whispers to her, as they whispered together in Freya's dim sanctum. It tells her about Ravenna. About all she has done. About all that waits beyond the veil of reflection.

 _Death,_ she thinks, but the unfinished mirror castigates her with light. It lies puzzled together, golden in the sparse green growth revealed by the rebirth of spring. It hangs in a sheltered alcove, glittering with futures. With faces.

Freya watches it closely, her thoughts branded with sigils against the threat of fading away. As the pieces are assembled, she becomes more tenacious. She dreams of frost creeping south. She plans her progress with her head pressed to the chill, splintered metal. It shows her Ravenna's roosts. It shows her maps of worlds both real and unvisited.

It shows her the way forward, and the way is war.

* * *

**W** ickedness did not frighten Ravenna, nor the slow temptation of want or weariness. Her lessons taught her what they meant but not exactly what they threatened. They were things in the distance. Shapes within shadows. She used her magic freely and saw that it brought no pain upon anyone. That was her right, she knew, since the magic came to her of its own accord, burning and seething until she thought her skin must be cooked black on the inside. It _asked_ her to be wielded, like the knife of old tales that demanded blood before it would cut darkness away from the world. So when she had a whim, she fulfilled it. When Freya took ill and could not sleep, she silenced the birdsong echoing in the hills and cedars surrounding the old woman's hut. When scavengers dared the herb garden, she banished them with bruising force. When her teeth ached with the need to invoke power, she would find the most bendable of her brothers, the owl-eyed boy named Finn, and test her finer wiles on the sly art of compulsion. She found he would do anything she asked, short of bringing harm or fear to the family. And even that, she thought with certainty, could be enchanted from him over time.

As the seasons turned like wheels, the old woman watched her ever more closely; her vision, though veiled with clouds, could not be eluded. Often she brought them close at night, all three leaning over coals banked down to dry meat and flowers, and shared secrets she had gleaned from the world during her travels. She was not an outcast in the family by any means — but if she was, it would have been for the distance she had gone, the comfort she had taken in the conceit of her powers among outsiders. All the stories she had to tell were rare and thrilling. And sometimes they spoke with strange precision to the airs and doubts foremost in Ravenna's mind. 

"Our bloodline has a raw, red thirst," she told them one evening, the scent of cedar stinging red in their eyes. "You girls know this. It draws like a flame. And already I feel it draw toward the both of you."

Gaunt in the low light, Freya had frowned then. She did not interrupt but seemed to feel at the absence of power in her like a missing tooth. Ravenna watched her, as sympathetic as her great talent would allow.

"In some ways I do you a disservice by keeping you here, away from the mothers and your freedom to choose your own homes."

"We can leave if we please," Ravenna observed and the old woman smiled with loathsome shadows at play on her face like a necromancer's cursed veil.

"You can. Every day, it is my blessed luck that you do not. And in gratitude, I offer to teach you something that you will perhaps deign to learn."

Rapt, Ravenna shifted closer to her, hardly aware of the heat from the coals or Freya's hand closing fast on her fingers.

"Vessels," the old woman said. Slowly, as though she might have begun to regret the thought. "What comes to mind when I say it?"

"A daughter of your own body," Ravenna answered, with Freya in chorus.

"A child," the old woman agreed. "Yes. The jaws of inheritance, closing fast on your wellspring of power. And if you make no child?"

Ravenna shrugged, said: "Any child can be beloved."

"True. Say, then, you're not yet willing to bear the great burden of a mother's love?"

The girls were silent. This, Ravenna knew, was their secret reward.

Brawny arms glowing above the fire, the old woman reached out and put her open palm gently upon each of them as though weighing the value of two futures before her. "You make a snag. A box to put your power. As pretty as you like. And I, my loves, will tell you how it is done."

* * *

_W_ ith winter's spears still weeks behind her, struggling to traverse the high southern defenses of the marshland and the deep forest, Freya invades the last stronghold held by the dredges of her sister's flock. The queen, preceding her vanguard. A play Ravenna should recognize; it is one of her own.

On white wings, she goes to the ocean cliffs where Ravenna has come to nest. Soars over the great castle wall, pale in the darkness, and prowls the streets as a lethal chill. Hunger grants her crimson jaws and a mouthful of fangs but she meets no prey. Windows squeeze dark and blind on every house, every shed and stable and workshop. Alone in the empty market square, she looks up at Snow White's castle — twice-stolen, a poor omen for any king or queen who may try to take it now — with the moon in her eyes. The towers twist like hands locked in shackles. Starless, silent. A black trap waiting to catch all that enters its grasp.

Freya pads through the unguarded gates. Long silks reach out to her in the hollow halls, lifted by a slow, cold wind that answers her mighty breaths and clattering claws. The castle is filled with fire, bowls and torches and pits of it, first few and then many. Higher and higher, the spires rise inside like an inferno. Smoke writhes against the high ceilings, ghostly and tormented. Firelight dances demonically. Freya snarls and the sound is laughter. Whether it is fear or insolence that drives Ravenna, she squanders her last true weapon with marvellous negligence. Freya ascends grand staircases on the heels of firelicked shadows, snapping to speed their progress. She follows as they flee along narrowing passages and rough service steps not meant for royal feet. In a great circular room ringed with windows, some stargazer's tower transformed by roosts and flame, she stops and howls.

Ravenna's voice is above her, the deep intonation of an iron bell: "You are not my sister."

Sorcery lashes at Freya from the pool of her own shadow and she whirls upright to meet the assault in her true form. The oldest; the first. If they were sisters together once, they are sisters still. Let Ravenna look upon the face of the woman she betrayed; a good woman, long dead and sealed in ice. Beautiful and unchanging and cold.

Her vanity stung, Ravenna emerges an instant later, dividing herself from the dark substance of the night. Even diminished, her magic is a daunting presence. Freya can sense it shifting beneath them like a root that curls down and down into the deep rock girding the ocean. Sees it shivering on her perfect face, all the glamour and witchery fuming in the cracks between melded beak and talon, smoothing the dusty texture of feathers from her flesh. It clothes Ravenna in black scale and gold wire, the livery of a dragon wrapped around some ruinous horde. A great waste without the mirror to pass judgement on her, to take her own eye and place it in the skull of a prophet. For the first time, Freya truly wonders what she saw upon its smudged surface. What face or form she conjured to voice her fears and ambitions.

"I am," Freya replies, "and even your power cannot change that, but it is not why I've come." She extends her hand, fingertips blackened. "The shards, Ravenna."

"It is my mirror," she hisses. "Mine."

"Yes, it is your work. It is your magic. And I will take it from you. Give me the shards. I need nothing more from you. You may keep the castle if you like. It makes no difference." Ice gasps forth from her, crumbling the stone underfoot like fingers raking at Ravenna's hem. "Or resist. It will be my pleasure to drag you away with me."

Ravenna's sudden fury towers over them like a glassy black cliff, split and fissured. The spire shatters around them and they are whipped down screaming winds on their summoned wings, twisting and slashing as they descend the black walls. Freya tears ravens from the air and golden shards rain from them, drawn to her talons. With a blast of magic, Ravenna opens the great theater of her throne room to the night sky and plunges inside as though it holds her salvation. Freya laughs, a vulture's scream. No mirror waits there to shield its master. Her exhilaration is like a frenzy and she strikes down through the breach, freezing everything within her grasp, lashing out at her full strength to seize all living warmth, each flicker of flame, every pillar and flagstone and tile. Frozen ravens fall and dash against the ice, black and gruesome. Those that do not die immediately are left to her meager mercies. Until there is only one. The last. Ravenna herself, now; a great bedraggled mass of quills and claws.

Freya takes hold of her in a fog of wolf's breath. Bears her, slow and deliberate, like carrion from the throne room. The castle is worth nothing to her; she leaves it in icy ruins, her powers still blighting the silks and marble. Fires sputter and die. Brittle iron locks creak in the corridors, threatening to crumble. It is no concern of hers what becomes of Snow White's kingdom. She supposes it will persist, as many do.

* * *

**U** ntil her blood mother died, Ravenna understood the source of power only passingly. It was not ignorance that hampered her; the old woman refused no question the girls could think to ask and had explained the source of their abilities as explicitly as she was able. Power was like all the water in the world, she had said, wrapping the world like a ribbon that flowed through every stream and river and sea. The image shone clear in Ravenna's mind but it did not satisfy her. It did not explain how to _make_ power, or why some of the long dead grandmothers were mentioned only fearfully in stories about those strange, distant lands from which the family had come. _Your beauty is your power,_ her blood mother told her but that was a lie. Ravenna had long ago discovered that people would say such things to children when they had no other answers. Or, worse, when they found the truth abhorrent.

It was cold and grey when the horsemen chased death and thunder up from the valley, swords flashing through wet veils of autumn mist. Ravenna scrambled from the cedars to find that her family was in flight, her mothers and children scattering, their deep reserves of magic snapping wide and flooding over her in a horrible rush as people she had known all her life were cut down from behind. Still and spectral at the heart of all chaos, the old woman was raising her scarred hands over a group of children unable to shield themselves or fight. Freya was among them, tears shining through her hands. Under that powerful veil, they all passed unseen, away from the roads toward the hills that would loop the valley's depths. As she watched, those avid swords turned aside from them thoughtlessly and horses balked without explanation. Ravenna watched them go, realizing she was held fast in the grip of the mother who had always watched her too closely, rebuked the old woman too harshly. Always the first to call her beautiful. She lied one last time and told Ravenna that she must run, so she fled into the hard, grey hills alone with the shock of hoofbeats racing against the terror in her heart.

A day and a night later, the woman died. Ravenna knew the precise moment, felt it in her heart as her shattered family dwindled and the pool of her own energies grew and grew.

The power came and found her, and she knew.

* * *

_T_ he raven frets and smolders in Freya's jaws as she lopes north, white strides shocking the landscape to wintry stillness at her back. They go as one beast, feathers fused to wolfhide, black smoke and cold tendrils climbing tall trees into the sky. Freya makes for the black scaffold of the northern mountains, her pace merciless. The roads run empty and true before them, an unbreakable path leading back to the mirror's waiting eye.

Ravenna stills when she sees it. Shrewdness seems to seep from her, congealing like the taste of rot on Freya's tongue; she drops the raven at last and Ravenna's magic rallies with careless ease, wreathing her like vapors. She takes her finest form and kneels in the alcove, perfect face upturned. Reflected light wanders on the mossy stone before her, watery and gilt. She does not notice the shapes and sigils it draws, the crossed lines that call foreboding. Freya waits behind her and watches as some aspect of the moment begins to disquiet her. Some sound, or some perfect silence. Some shadow crawling toward her beneath the floating beams of fey lights.

"You," Freya tells her, "shall repair it."

Ravenna does not wince. Not quite. Haughty, she rises and places her fingertips on the golden shards. Her eyes are bright with superiority as she gathers herself for the feat.

Freya snatches her fingers into a fist. The final shards snap into place and the fractured metal suddenly gasps with light to lie whole under Ravenna's feeble hand. Ever aware of appearances, Ravenna only smiles faintly, strangely. When she begins to draw away, the movement is slow and measured. A serpent's steady recoil. Power is steeped in her eyes, brewing for the inevitable strike — but she holds herself fast, vitally aware of the mirror. It is darkening, crowding with brassy shadows, and she casts no reflection among them. She turns to Freya, finally realizing that the crux of their conflict is not as she has perceived it.

"Speak the words," Freya commands.

Ravenna's face is a demon's mask, brutal and breathtaking in defeat.

"Mirror," she says coldly, " _mirror_."

Gold, it stretches and pours. Bright, it floods the cairn with spring warmth. Shadows and ice alike skitter back, affronted.

"Thank you, sister," Freya says, and meets the flow of metal unprotected, moving through it as though stepping into sunlight. The mirror's surface offers her no resistance; it even seems to welcome her, reaching out with gentle, guiding hands to draw her inside.

Dazzled, she turns back only once and beholds Ravenna. Astonishment is breaking her savage, pretty mask into many parts. Dread, contempt and triumph are all caught in motion at once, transfixed — and then the pieces slip like wet feathers molting free. The last vials of power drain from her, coursing after Freya through the open threshold into the mirror's heart. That lovely face shrivels, revealed. Ravenna _sees_ it happen, clear in the mirror's veil as it glazes over between them, impassable. Her milky eyes go wide and wild. Her raw mouth hinges wide on a breath that seems to burn and burn.

A scream, Freya thinks. Strange; the only sounds she can discern are birdsong and the laughter of a child at play in the distance.

Freya puts her back to Ravenna, even before she has faded from sight. If the mirror's golden eye still gathers visions, it sees her walk toward a familiar line of low huts freckling the green hills ahead until, at last, it shuts.

* * *

**S** ummer rediscovers the northlands, briefly. Lichen and thin grasses spread across the vast, stony steppe. Birdsong trembles at its edges, carried further than any bird will venture even on such warm winds.

In the sheltered alcove where her mirror still hangs in the sun, the crone who is no longer Ravenna kneels with her gnarled hands on the tarnished metal. She speaks the words, over and over. Her horrid face is lowered so that she will not risk a glimpse of it.

"Mirror, mirror," she rasps, "on the wall. Who is the fairest of all?"

She must look then. She does. She hears the breath go from herself in a soft gasp like the sound of a tomb door opening and she bows her head again in fear, in disbelief. For the mirror makes no response. It offers no vision of her blood mother to assuage her vanity. It shows her no sign of the vainglorious kings she has hewn from their thrones, or the pretty girls she has consumed, or even the roots and thorns of her family, the parts for which she had no use, caught and cut open like sacrifices to release their hoarded magic. They should appear to her. They should come clothed in a golden cloak and tell her she has won. The magic should be _shared_.

And so it is, among those who were robbed of it. Elsewhere, vast and unknowable.

Ravenna speaks the words to a mirror that watches her blindly and silence is the only reply.


End file.
